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November 27, 2010

The Autodidactic Imperative

I am between projects, and I feel the pull of the imperative. When I have time, not working, my mind reminds me of all those things I don't know. And so I need to know which means when I have a minute I prefer to learn rather than to be entertained. At least I do when I have peace of mind, which I do right now.

But since I'm such a scatterbrain, I'm going to need to blog my way to sanity and keep track of all the 20 minute foci I am able to maintain when my impatience gets the better of me and I pop from window to window.

So I'm reading my Java and my Python, learning both simultaneously. I'd like to play with Ruby and may have to, but it feels like cheating and I've been cheating too long. I need to address the sophisticated fundamentals so that I can make choices more intelligently in the future. In otherwords I'm invoking the Overkill Rule.

So I've got Eclipse set up on each of my machines. I'm making Vega into the big server - although I should probably have one more server. I'll have to figure out what's light enough to put on the smaller machines. I think at the very least, I'll have LDAP on Metis. Although I'm finding it very easy to do installs on OS X, and it works the way I like - so there's a decent chance I get a Mac Mini for Christmas.

I am getting frustrated finding a decent JDBC driver set for free. I've gotten the connections to work across the two MySql databases that I've setup using Toad for SQL, SQLYog and MySQL Workbench, but not quite there with the Eclipse SQL plugin. Yes of course its overkill, which is, as I said, the point. What I really want is a good set so I can play with the basics and then wrap my Talend and PDI toolsets around them. But I got source level packages which meant I had to figure out the com.blah.this.thatDriver file hierarchy and stuff for Java. Should be easy in a couple weeks as I get to understand the differences between the way Eclipse would build stuff and how Git would (with Ant?). So the current task is getting a handle on Java builds, debugs, packages, classes and all that organizational rot. Annoying Frosh stuff.

I'm pretty sure that I don't want NetBeans. I think I'll be happy enough with Tomcat and ignore JBoss and Glassfish and won't worry about the integration. I tend to go a bit old school anyway and got TextWrangler (instead of BBEdit) for the Mac. Since I can run shebang..